Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

We took a table by the door.

‘I think you know what I’m going to ask,’ I said.

Faustina looked at me and waited.

‘You work in an apothecary, but you were in the palace on the night of the banquet …’

‘That’s your question?’

I nodded.

‘There’s a reason,’ she said, ‘but I can’t tell you — at least, not yet.’ She sipped her acquerello . ‘It was nothing to do with you.’

The old woman brought us a thin rice broth, a plate of white beans and some cold cabbage. I asked for bread. She didn’t have any. As we ate, Faustina spoke about her childhood, which she had spent in Torremagna, a hill-top village south-east of Siena. She had lived with her father’s sister, Ginevra Ferralis, in a house whose back wall formed part of the old fortifications. She had grown up thinking of Ginevra as her mother. Ginevra had sharp elbows and long, slightly bandy legs, and there was a violet smear on her left cheek, as if she had been out gathering wild berries and had reached up absentmindedly to wipe her face. She had never married, though she had been engaged to the son of a local judge, who had left her for a richer woman only a few weeks before the wedding. She learned the bitter coin-taste of abandonment, and no man was allowed into the house again, except for Sabatino Vespi, who courted her for a decade and didn’t get over the threshold more than a handful of times.

Vespi was much older than Ginevra, Faustina said, and though he lived on a ridge outside Torremagna, he spent most afternoons on a plot of land at the foot of the village walls, directly below Ginevra’s house. It was there, on a west-facing slope, that he grew the fruit and vegetables that he sold in the nearby market town. Faustina would often go with him. They would leave so early that stars would still be scattered across the sky, and she would sit on the tailboard, facing backwards, her bare feet dangling above the white dust road. Wrapped in a rug that smelled of earth, she would watch as the dark shapes of scrub oaks, pines and cypresses jolted by.

One Tuesday morning, when she was nine or ten, he broke a long silence with a question that caught her off guard, though she knew, with the uncanny, unearned certainty of a child, that this was a subject he had been turning over in his mind for years. ‘Do you think your mother would ever marry me?’

‘Do you want to marry her?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Intrigued by the force he had put into the words, she scrambled over the heaps of onions and garlic, and climbed up on to the bench-seat.

‘So you love her?’

Vespi looked towards the moon, which had faded as the darkness faded, and was now no more than a chalk scratch on the slowly heating pale blue of the sky.

‘I loved her long before she got engaged,’ he said. ‘I loved her before she knew what love was. I loved her first .’

She had never heard him talk about his feelings before — it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have any — and she stared at his battered, unshaven features with a kind of awe.

‘Does she know that?’

‘No.’

‘You never told her?’

‘I should have. I was too shy, though.’ He looked at her. ‘You think it’s too late?’

If she tried to imagine Ginevra’s heart, she saw wood-shavings, and bacon-rind, and thin, curling off-cuts of boot-leather. It was like peering into the corner of a shed, or into a room that was hardly ever used. She hoped her heart never looked like that.

Vespi saw that she had no reply for him. ‘You do, don’t you? You think it’s too late for poor old Vespi.’

Once, when Vespi appeared at the house with a basket of his own fruit and vegetables, she had watched through a crack in the door. Why do you keep bothering me? she heard Ginevra say. Why can’t you leave me alone? Vespi stood in silence, his chin lowered almost to his breastbone. It’s because I’m all you can get, isn’t it? Ginevra said. Is that what I am? All you can get? Still Vespi didn’t speak. Ginevra stepped close to him and angled her face in such a way that her birthmark must have filled his field of vision. You’re sorry for me, aren’t you? Why not admit it? Then, shockingly, she turned sideways and vomited on the floor. Vespi’s hand hovered near the small of her back as she bent over. He didn’t dare to touch her, though. He muttered something — Faustina thought she heard the word beautiful — but Ginevra was on her hands and knees by then, clearing up the mess, and didn’t notice.

Vespi’s grip on the reins had slackened. ‘It’s too late.’

‘I don’t know.’ She shifted beside him on the bench-seat. ‘You’ll have to do something unexpected.’

‘Like what?’

‘That’s for you to think of.’

They had come to a standstill on the crest of a hill. The dirt road dropped steeply away in front of them, the valley below filled with dense white fog.

‘Don’t you have any ideas?’ Vespi said at last.

‘It would be better if it came from you.’

Sitting hunch-shouldered, a nerve pulsing in his cheek, Vespi stared at the shrouded landscape. ‘Ah. Yes. I see.’

Almost a year later, he walked up to her while she was waiting outside the ironmonger’s. It was a winter’s day, grey cloud shutting out the sun, and yet his face seemed to be radiating light. He asked if she had looked out of her window recently. She studied him. Was this a riddle? A joke?

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Have you?’

‘I look out of the window every day,’ she said.

‘Yes, but have you looked down ?’

She frowned. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘And your mother?’

‘My mother what?’

‘ Dio cane! ’ Vespi tilted his head back, his Adam’s apple sticking out like something he had swallowed by mistake.

As she watched him, thoroughly bewildered, white flakes began to drop out of the sky.

‘Snow!’ she cried.

Vespi groaned. Gripping her arm, he made her promise to persuade her mother to look out of the window — to look down — before everything was ruined.

Ginevra stepped out of the ironmonger’s, her newly sharpened knives wrapped in a piece of calico. ‘What are you two plotting?’

At home again, while Ginevra put the knives back in their drawer, Faustina peered over the windowsill. Vespi had completely reorganized his allotment. Viewed from above, the rows of vegetables now spelled out a question: WILL YOU MARRY ME? She smiled. So he had thought of something after all. The snow was falling faster, though, and if it settled it would blur the words, or even render them illegible. Risking Ginevra’s anger, for she hated to be interrupted in the middle of a task, Faustina asked if she had looked out of the window.

‘I know,’ Ginevra said. ‘It’s snowing.’

‘No, not that.’

‘What, then?’

‘Look outside. Please.’

Ginevra banged the drawer shut and crossed the room. Once at the window, she stared at the landscape intently, as if driven by some compulsion of her own. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

‘You have to look down.’

As Ginevra leaned out over the sill, snow blew past her, into the room. It was so cold that the flakes lay on the floor without melting.

She knew what Ginevra would say even before she stepped back from the window, and now, after all these years, she wondered why she had cared so much. Surely it wasn’t because she had wanted Sabatino Vespi for a father — or was it? Had she become so desperate for a father that almost anybody would have done? Or had she longed to see Ginevra surprised, altered — even, possibly, happy? Or was it more abstract than that? Had she simply hoped that love would triumph? Vespi may have been old and ravaged, and he may have lived with his mother until he was past the age of fifty, but at least he felt something. Wanted something. And so she waited, heart beating high up in her throat, as Ginevra turned to face her, brushing the snow from her hair and shoulders with gestures that were swift and brutal, just as they were when she wrung a chicken’s neck or paunched a rabbit.